NASA HEALTH AND AIR QUALITY APPLIED SCIENCES TEAM
Connecting NASA Data and Tools with Health and Air Quality Stakeholders

Dr. Amber Soja

Credentials: NASA Langley Research Center

Email: amber.j.soja@nasa.gov

Headshot of Amber Soja

Amber Soja is a physical scientist who serves as a NASA Wildland Fire Science Program Manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center (LaRC). She has over 25 years of experience in using satellite and ground-based data for wildland fire and air quality research. She has served on the Wildfire Resilience and Smoke Impacts Interagency Working Groups (IWGs), NOAA’s Interagency Council on Advancing Meteorological Services (ICAMS) Fire Weather working group (WG), the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF) Board of Directors, and serves as a Subject Matter Expert for LaRC’s fire communities.

HAQAST Project: Aligning Wildland Fire Emissions Data and Information to Answer Specific Health Questions to Inform Public Action: Answers may lie in the detail

Fire and smoke management, Air Quality (AQ) and health, and federal to local communities have reached a consensus to shift from reactive to proactive fire management to enable beneficial fire, with the goal to mitigate and manage wildfire to reduce fuels and support safe communities. While the benefits of prescribed fire to mitigate wildfire risks in communities are unequivocal, how to balance these risks with smoke management, AQ, and human health is a complex and critical question. We will work with our partner communities to guide and inform this research, with the goal to provide information that can inform wildland fire and smoke management communities and public health actions.

Project goals / deliverables:

  • Enhance the National Fire Emission Inventory where the inventory is ‘missing’ fire, particularly prescribed fire on private lands, in regions defined by our partners. We will use multiple low-to-very-high resolution satellites and ground-based data to statistically quantify missing fires and burned area.
  • Establish a baseline data record of prescribed fire and wildfire across the Continental United States for 10 years (2010-2019), using information from satellite data, agencies, non-profits, and state inventories.
  • Classify PM2.5 concentrations by major fire and fuel types: wildfire and prescribed fire; fuels (e.g., grass, forest) for 8 years (2013 – 2020) in a CMAQ model framework to estimate ambient surface concentrations to quantify population exposures to inform the epidemiological study.
  • Epidemiological study: Statistically analyze health outcomes using Emergency Department data (2013 – 2020) from 11 states, using distinct fire and fuel exposure types.

Co-investigators and partners: Emily Gargulinski (National Institute of Aerospace), Yang Liu (Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health), Daniel Tong (George Mason University), Youhua Tang (George Mason University), Colleen Reid (University of Colorado), Antonio Neri (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Kayla McCauley (US Environmental Protection Agency), J. Morgan Varner (Tall Timbers Research Station), Holly Nowell (Tall Timbers Research Station), Chris Matechik (Tall Timbers Research Station), Michael Geigert (Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection), Amanda Fritz (Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection)

HAQAST Publications